


Rentboy on Montague Street

by theshockblanket



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Cocaine, Drug Addiction, Gen, M/M, Prostitution, Rentboys, Whump, pre-John
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-14
Updated: 2012-05-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 15:23:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/382938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshockblanket/pseuds/theshockblanket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>2002 - 2010. Twenty-two year-old Sherlock plunges headfirst into the gritty London underworld of prostitution, selling his body to fund his cocaine addiction. His brother Mycroft, distracted by work and his rising power in political affairs, is too distracted to make the proper enquiries, and Sherlock sinks deeper and deeper into trouble, too proud - or ashamed - to ask his family for help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Not a Secret Diary of a Call Girl style rentboy!fic; more my exercise in slightly minimalistic writing, with a gritty theme. This fic aims to highlight the dangers of the underworld and substance abuse reasonably realistically, though I have no personal experience of these.

_ _________________________________________________________________________ _

_ **NOVEMBER, 2002** _

The first time, he is twenty-two and fresh out of university, so high that his lips vibrate on the other man’s cock with the sheer _intensity_ of the cocaine singing in his bloodstream. It’s filthy and exciting and raw, down on his knees in the dark, dirty alleyway, senses so elevated that the other man’s gasps and grunts rattle like gunfire in his ears.

Sherlock does not need a mirror to know that his pupils are blown moon-wide beneath the black curls plastered to his sweaty brow. The stranger cups a hand behind his head, the broad pad of his thumb pressing against the knobbly bump of Sherlock’s neck vertebrae to keep him there as he comes, spurting the hot, salty mess into Sherlock’s throat.

Sherlock knows they should have used a condom and wants to kick himself, but he can’t rouse himself enough to care. He feels zoned, distant, as though it’s happening to someone else’s body; someone else’s mouth.

He spits anyway, out of some belated display of pride.

The man nods at him awkwardly, buttoning up his trousers and fumbling for his wallet. Sherlock is still riding out the last wave of his high when the man disappears around the corner, and he stares down at the thin wad of wrinkled five pound notes and thinks, _oh,_ and vomits.

But thirty minutes later he is sitting in a warm, all-night café with a steaming mug of black tea and even the crash from the cocaine doesn’t matter, because he’s warm and he can have _three, four, five_ more mugs if he wants them, and he can take a taxi to this week’s bed-and-breakfast instead of walking there in the freezing rain.

He won’t do it again, he tells himself.

*

He does.

It becomes an addiction; a need. It’s not the clients - so _dull,_ so _pedestrian_ \- but the allure of _afterwards_ that he loves. He pays off what he owes on the debts and he can still afford to inject himself three, four, five times a week with money for cigarettes. The cocaine leaves his throat sore and his skin flushed with a heat that will not dissipate, but he finds that the best answer is simply to take more, until his arm is covered in tiny pinpricks and he is moaning and convulsing with the pleasure of the high, alone in a squalid hotel room where even the shadows are fiercely bright in their vivid blackness.

He hates the work, but he is good at it. He knows how to lick them until they are gasping; how to hum as he moves his lips, bobbing up and down. He knows just how much pressure to apply so that they feel it even through the thin latex, the limits of dragging his teeth over the condom. He knows when they want him to be sweet and messy and when they want him to be quick and dirty, hot mouth working swiftly to bring them off with the minimum of fuss. He knows when they want him to look them in the eye and when they want him to squeeze his eyes closed as if they’re forcing him, as if he hates it. Those are the days he doesn’t have to pretend.

He learns to disengage his gag reflex. It’s messy the first few times, but he learns with every mistake - _data, data, data_ \- and it’s worth it, in the end, when a thickset bouncer tips him twenty quid on top of what Sherlock asks for in the alley behind the nightclub.

The amount he makes in a day can be measured by the rising thread count of his hotel bed sheets. He fucks, sucks and whores himself through several men a week - sometimes more than one a day, if he catches someone’s eye during their lunch break, or manages to catch a quick two or three in the toilets of the London Underground during the afternoon rush hour.

The work is irregular, asymmetrical; he can roll condoms onto three men in a day and then go for a week without finding anyone. Those are the weeks he doubles up on the cocaine and cuts back on food, on hotel quality - on everything, anything but the drugs.

It gets harder after he begins to up his game - he goes after clean-shaven, good-looking men, bankers or financial advisers. They’re rarer, in London, but he’s less worried about the tedium of contracting a disease, though he tries to tell himself it’s an ego-boost. Fucking himself on the cock of Hector Larrington-Clyde is marginally less demeaning than arguing about the necessity of a condom in oral sex with Billy from the council estate while Billy’s four kids are at their mum’s.

Most of them don’t complain about the condom - the married ones, he notices, usually insist on it - and some even worry about whether _Sherlock_ is infected, which surprises him.

He quickly realises that these are the men with more to lose.

After the fifth man asks to see some kind of medical evidence - as if rent boys carry _paperwork_ in their boxers - Sherlock throws him out with a snarled insult and goes to the local anonymous clinic for testing and immunisations. His results come back clean, shockingly enough, though when the immunisation nurse tries to ask him about the jab-marks on his arm he says that he’ll tell her if she admits to her husband that she’s sleeping with the female secretary.

She gives the needle an unnecessary twist when she pulls it out, but says nothing more about the marks on his arms.

****

**_MARCH, 2003_ **

Five months go by, and Mycroft doesn’t call, which frustrates Sherlock. Half the fun of the drugs, the drink, the endless chain of cigarettes is the knowledge that it infuriates Mycroft to a degree beyond any other; reduces him to a mere man, tearing his hair out and shouting obscenities about nicotine and lung cancer at Sherlock down a phone line. Sherlock likes to let Mycroft rant; occasionally he listens and laughs, but more often he will balance the phone on top of something - a stack of books, a soap dish, the toilet roll-dispenser - and wander off to find a needle or a twist of paper with a few grams left in it, while Mycroft’s tinny voice echoes in the grimy bathroom of whatever temporary bedsit Sherlock has found himself in this week.

But for the first time since he can remember, Mycroft does not notice what he is doing. Mycroft is _busy._

Mycroft is a politician on the up, his mother tells him, on the rare occasions he goes home, and she sounds so _proud_ that it makes his chest clench. Mycroft is fat and brainless and _dull._ Mycroft is vanilla, boring; obsessed with three-piece suits and pretentious Old Boys from Eton. Mycroft does not sleep in alleys and cheap bed-and-breakfasts and tiny rooms upstairs in seedy London pubs.

It’s in one of those seedy pubs - the sort with dust in the glasses and paint jobs at least ten years old - that he meets Michael.

“What’s your name, pretty boy?” murmurs Michael, and Sherlock stops to take the measure of the agent for a split second - _blonde, mid-thirties, suave, sophisticated, will want forty percent of the cash_ \- before he’s slipping down from the barstool and murmuring _Alexander_ into the man’s ear enticingly.

“Of course it is,” says the man, eyes glittering, and leads him out to the car.

Inside, in the black leather backseat, it’s all business.

“I want forty percent,” Michael tells him, leaning back and cracking his knuckles.

Sherlock is still holding the bottle from the pub, forefinger circling the damp rim of the cold neck. The advantages - _more clients, more money, more drugs_ \- are stacking up against the disadvantages in his mind. _More exploitation. More hands, touching him, using him, hurting him, threatening him -_

“Fifteen,” he says.

“I will vet your clients,” points out Michael. “I will keep you safe.” He glances at the pin-prick marks on Sherlock’s arm and curls his lip. “I will even find you a new dealer. Cheaper, I promise... For thirty-five.”

Sherlock is feeling heady from the effects of the alcohol and the lingering remnants of heroin he injected as a substitute for lunch. “Eighteen.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Michael glances at his watch - _Rolex, expensive, a new model,_ Sherlock notes. “Thirty-three. Nothing less.”

Sherlock leans into him, half-closing his eyes, so that his black lashes almost kiss his carved white cheekbones. He catches his wrist. “Feel,” he says, guiding him, and when Michael’s hand closes over the swollen half-hard outline of his clothed cock, Sherlock smirks.

“Twenty-five,” says Michael, “and you can have a smoke. Silk Cut.” He pulls a pearly-white box from inside his suit, tapping the purple logo.

 _No one was ever paid to be proud_ , thinks Sherlock, and reaches for his lighter.

　

*

　

From that night on, he is always Alexander to clients; never a surname, never even _Alex;_ only Alexander, and he plays his part beautifully.

Michael owns a set of middle-sized furnished flats in Montague Street, and Sherlock takes up residence in one on the first floor. Two more of Michael’s boys - a Latvian student from the nearby International Business School and a freckled Scottish kid of barely twenty - already live on the floors above, but he rarely sees them. They have an unspoken agreement, and they are just as keen to avoid him as he is to avoid them.

His bedroom is sparsely-furnished - a single bed in the corner, with a grey blanket and pillow. The floorboards creak and the thin striped rug has seen better days, but the oak wardrobe is clean and sturdy, and the sink runs hot _and_ cold water. Besides, Sherlock doesn’t care. It’s _his,_ and that makes it better than any of the higher-end hotels he has managed to get himself into over the past few months.

If he catches sight of himself in the dusty mirror over the sink when he shaves, and sees hollow cheeks under the white foam and tiny pupils lost in a sea of cloudy grey, it doesn’t matter. He’s always been thin, and if his pale skin stretches over his ribs like wrapping paper over a skeleton then it makes no difference to how well he can suck cock.

Besides, Sherlock is _clever_.

He learns to gauge what a punter wants and how much he will pay and adjusts his price list accordingly. He can tell which ones are single and which ones have just hidden their wedding rings. He can tell from the way they walk whether they prefer to take control or be seduced; he knows their limits and how far he can push his sly comments and observations before they turn on him.

It’s not usually very far.

_**JUNE, 2004** _

It’s hard to process that he has been doing this for over a year.

He takes the money before they even pass his door, in an unmarked envelope, as pre-arranged with his agent - Sherlock _hates_ the word pimp - and leaves them in the bathroom to “prepare”. Then Sherlock calls Michael, who is usually at a party or lounging in his penthouse or playing golf with investment bankers - and they agree a time for Sherlock to call back.

Sherlock is under no illusions about any of these rules. Michael is not sentimental; he does not care whether ‘Alexander’ lives or dies. It’s a cold, hard rationality; Sherlock’s body is a commodity, a service, one outlet in his chain of supply. Damage to Sherlock is a break in the cash flow; a red cell on a spreadsheet, a dip in the graph. It’s why Sherlock has a constant supply of fresh needles; why his cocaine is always cocaine and never half-salt and fine sawdust. It’s why he continues to take routine STD tests and has a constant supply of thin ribbed condoms - though Sherlock has to order the lube himself. He doesn’t mind, much; at least if he slicks up the mens’ latexed cocks with Durex Playit makes it easier to bear the merciless thrusting when the punters fuck his skinny arse, his cheek pressed into the mattress or scraping against the wall while he moans fake obscenities and thinks about the high that he can get out of this; how much he can inject himself with when they leave.

Sherlock knows perfectly well that Michael would have him off the drugs in a heartbeat if either of them believed that the agent had any power without them. The drugs are why he puts up with it, with the endless degradation, the squalor, the claustrophobia of Montague Street.

“You are a good whore, my little Alexander,” says Michael, peaceably, when he calls around for Sherlock’s twenty-five percent. He glances around the scrubby kitchen, curling his lip in distaste. Sherlock has given up entirely on the potted flowers and resorted to two large spider plants and a Venus flytrap on the tiny kitchen windowsill. The effect is rather Spartan. The sink is barely used, though the bin is overflowing with three weeks’ worth of takeaway food. Michael’s eyes linger on it for a moment before he says, “People phone me and ask for you, you know. The pretty one with the pale face, they say; the one who looks like a prince.”

Sherlock says nothing. The punters do like him, but he knows full well that his cheekbones aren’t what interest them; they’re just the packaging, the advertisement. It’s been steadily worsening, he knows; he can afford to shave at proper barber shops and have his hair cut short - the punters love him after a haircut; he looks eighteen again and all the more debauched for it, when they fuck him - but nothing can disguise the grey hollows under his eyes, or the raw skin where he has clawed at it out of some panicked hour of withdrawal when his dealer is late to the meeting. In the beginning, men talked about his eyes; now they’re rarely mentioned, cloudy and lifeless.

Michael presses on, oblivious to the inward track of Sherlock’s thoughts. “I want to start sending you some of my…special…clients,” he says. “They’ll pay more highly, of course.”

Sherlock looks down on the pretence of inspecting the set of clean syringes Michael has brought him this time. “Oh?”

“They’ll want more…unusual…services,” says Michael. “Though perhaps less bohemian surroundings.” He eyes the grubby wall tiles. “Occasionally they will ask you to visit them, instead of letting them attract attention by coming here.”

“London?” Sherlock asks, mostly because the fares for the Underground are quite enough without being sent outside the city on some overpriced Arriva train. He wonders if ticket-collectors take oral as currency. “What do they want?”

“Of course,” says Michael. “And nothing too dramatic, I assure you. Some domination, perhaps. You know the sort of thing.”

Sherlock hesitates and stares at the syringes. He wants to fill one of them now and press it to his arm, but Michael is talking again.

“I hope you’re not worrying about your dignity, Alexander,” he says. “You’re an intelligent boy; you know your body isn’t important. It’s just transport, isn’t that what you always say?”

“Yes,” says Sherlock dully.

“It’s what’s _inside_ the transport that counts,” Michael goes on. “Except that your body runs on cock, doesn’t it? Cock and cocaine, that’s what’s inside you. That’s what matters. So what does it matter what they’re doing to you, as long as they pay you? You get the money, don’t you? You get your _fix?_ ”

“Yes,” says Sherlock again. He clenches the barrel of the empty syringe so tightly he thinks it might snap.

Suddenly Michael knocks it from his hand and shoves him against the kitchen unit, pinning him with his body.

Sherlock’s breath catches in his throat. Michael has never used him, never even touched him. It’s one of the reasons he stays.

“I hope you won’t be difficult,” says Michael. “You’ll be a good little whore, won’t you?” He leans in, face dangerously close to Sherlock, body pressed against him, chest to chest, bending him backwards over the unit. It digs into the small of Sherlock’s back.

Sherlock considers telling Michael that he knows he has a wife, though he’s never mentioned her and doesn’t wear his ring to meet him. He considers telling him that he knows he has a circle of Thai boys imported from abroad, and that the police are looking for them.

“Say it!” thunders Michael, spit flying from his lips, and for the first time, Sherlock realises just how powerful this man is. Not even Mycroft -

He shuts that thought off. He doesn’t _need_ Mycroft to protect him.

“I won’t be difficult,” he says. His heart is pounding. “I’ll be a good little whore.”

Relief floods through him as Michael steps back, smirking. Sherlock stays where he is, blood still hammering in his ears, waiting.

“Good.” the blonde man says, smoothing his suit. “After all, what else are you good for?”

　

　

**_AUGUST, 2004_ **

In time, he learns to give them the things they do not dare to ask for. It makes them feel less guilty, less unclean, when he settles their hands on his hips and rides them like a jockey whilst they lie there with ball gags in their mouth, or when he presses whips into their hands and raises a dirty eyebrow. There is a regular that he mentally nicknames Handcuff who likes to be tied up whilst Sherlock licks his entire body; the cocaine abuse has limited his saliva productivity, and Sherlock’s throat and tongue feel swollen and rough, afterwards.  
  
Handcuff is by no means his strangest customer; there are men who like to fuck him in nothing but a school tie he picks up in a Hackney charity shop, and there are one or two who like him to wear lacy underwear and grind against them with it on, the material soft and slippery between their cocks. There are men who simply like to watch him jack off and men who prefer to turn him over and fuck him while he moans in a deliberately high-pitch and lets them call him names like _Lucy_ and _Rose._  


He pretends he enjoys what they do, what he gives them, because that gets them off faster; he charges by the act and not the hour, after all, and the sooner he can shoot himself into oblivion again the better. He tells them, too, that he does it because he is a good little whore, a willing slut, a toy to be used. In reality, he does it for the tips; the extra note thrown at him as they tuck themselves in and smooth their hair, ready to go to their next conference or business meeting or networking event.

Sherlock is all too aware of what he is. He sees girls on the street, in car parks and on swings and knows that many - if by no means all - of them came to it the way he did; a quick one off the wrist or on their knees in a dirty alley and now they can’t escape the cycle of drugs and debt and endless, endless filth. He has no time for them, chiefly because when he looks at their dead eyes he sees himself.

He thinks back to Oxford, back to Harrow, back to the time Mycroft took his tricorn hat away and told him gravely that Sherlock could be anything he wanted, and that _pirate_ was aiming a bit low.

Sherlock sits on his mattress, naked and sweating from his latest client, and wonders whether he could possibly aim any lower than this.　

_**DECEMBER, 2004** _

“You’re looking much…wealthier…these days,” says Mycroft, piercingly, though the pink paper crown from his Christmas cracker spoils the effect slightly. “Remind us all what you do, dear brother, since you won’t take money from the _family?_ ”

“I told you,” says Sherlock, helping himself to a piece of turkey, mainly because he can see Mycroft eyeing it. “I work in a hotel.”

It’s not a lie; he does in-calls as well as out-calls. He hates work in the hotel marginally less than in Montague Street, if only because he can leave the next morning.

“But you won’t tell me which one,” says Mycroft. His eyes bore into Sherlock.

“Of course not, I don’t want you visiting,” says Sherlock, smooth as silk. “Although…” He tilts his head to the side. “The door _is_ quite wide, but even so…I don’t imagine you’d fit.”

“At least I _eat,_ ” snarls Mycroft, reddening. “You look like-”

“Boys,” warns their mother, and they both shut up - at least until after dinner, when Sherlock wanders off to the family library and Mycroft follows him, talking all the while. Sherlock occasionally takes in the odd word; “ _drugs…positively ridiculous…potential…wasted…criminal…_ ”

“It’s my life,” Sherlock says, eventually, when he is sick of Mycroft’s incessant drone, and snaps the book closed. “I make my own choices.”

“Yes,” says Mycroft, bitterly, “but you’re not very good at it.”

Sherlock doesn’t deny it.

“Let me help you,” says Mycroft, gently. “Please, Sherlock. I’m your brother. Tell me what’s happening.”

Sherlock catches his eye, and for a brief second he wants to say _yes._

“No,” he says instead, forcefully, because Mycroft will _not_ win this, will not reel him in and let him down again. "No."

He _won’t_ ask Mycroft for help. He _won’t._

*

The next day, a tsunami hits the Indian Ocean, and in the midst of dealing with co-ordinating sixteen different operations and arranging a meeting with the leaders of several major NGOs, Mycroft’s secretary forgets to pass on Sherlock's three-word message; delivered with desperate gasps;  _call me back._  
  
Sherlock does not try again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You will notice that there are some things here which are not canon and other things which sort of are. For a start, Lestrade is still a Detective Sergeant, which is a rank below DI. Bear in mind we're still a few years away from the start of the BBC show, hence some things have to be taken into account, like rubbishy mobile phones! Also, DI Athelney Jones is a canon ACD character from the Sign of the Four, and I don't like him. You'll notice that. Plus, Sherlock's illness is a real side effect of cocaine use, so be warned! SAY NO TO DRUGS, etc. :D
> 
> Warning also for past OC death of a child due to cancer. :(
> 
> Sorry for slow updating. I hate my life. Ill, stressed... Nothing that won't pass though, so I should shut up and let you read.

**JANUARY, 2005**

 

Sherlock waits until his birthday for the monophonic, tinny ring of his Nokia to break the silence of the flat.

 

It does not.

 

His Samsung, on the other hand, rings _constantly._

 

“I can’t,” he says, dully, into the phone. “I’m ill.”

 

“ _Still?_?” Michael’s voice echoes threateningly down the static line. “Fuck this, Alexander, I’m too old to play your games. What is it this time, a headache? You work for me, kid. I give you a fucking place to live, I keep you fucking safe, I even make sure your drugs don’t give you some kind of fucking AIDS or something. And what do you do for me? You’ve missed the holiday season now, all the fucking tourists all hyped up about double-decker buses and Union Jacks and English boys, they’ve all gone home, and you didn’t get a penny off them. You’re freeloading off me, is what.”

 

Sherlock says nothing. He can feel the dull flush of his hot blood throbbing along his arteries, begging for cocaine. He rolls the cold metal spoon handle between his fingers; he’s got the powder, but he needs to dissolve it, first. The cocaine will fix him, will take away the stinging aches in his knees and spine that have been jabbing at him since Boxing Day.

 

“I don’t care what you have to do to get better,” Michael continues, voice hard. “But get well or get out. I’m not Oxfam, lad. I don’t let people live off my _charity_. If you’re not earning your keep, I’ll give the flat to someone else.”

 

*

 

Far from improving things, the cocaine assaults him, violently and without mercy.

 

On Tuesday, he ends up cancelling the two appointments Michael has bullied him into making because he cannot move his jaw without his brain screaming out in pain, nerve endings so ablaze he thinks they might implode. Michael sends him a series of scathing, derogatory texts until Sherlock turns it off and shoves it in the wardrobe, under the box of school ties and cheap plastic cuffs that he keeps for the clients who like to think their kinks are extreme.

 

On Wednesday, it’s worse. 

 

He wakes on the cold, ruthlessly hard kitchen floor where he passed out the night before, cheek damp with sweat where it presses against the tiles. His spine is locked in place, rigid from the curve between his bony hips up to the contorted vertebrae between his shoulder blades. There is an incessant ringing noise in his ears; he tries to shake it off, like a dog, but his neck is excruciatingly stiff.

 

It is _terrifying._

 

As soon as he can stand he does, and he can do nothing but pace, pace, pace around his stupid, tiny Montague Street flat, knees painful and sore, jaw stiff as iron, until it’s too much and he passes out against the side of the bed, eyes rolling back into his skull.

 

When he comes to again, his body is aching and something is pulsing in his brain, but he can walk, and he makes it to the kitchen sink and lets the cold stream of water splash over his face, dribbling into his open mouth; it’s cold and fresh and surprisingly stabilising. The metal rim of the sink is cool against the flushed skin of his fingers, but he can still feel his calves shaking with suppressed exhaustion, ankles threatening to roll in and collapse unless -

 

_Beep._

 

He ignores it. Mycroft can fuck off and die -

 

_Mycroft._

 

He pulls it from his pocket, damp fingers scrabbling on its hard plastic shell, hating himself for the weak clench of his chest, for this ridiculous weakness, and -

 

It is not a text. It says _battery low_.

 

White-hot tears of anger and frustration well up in his eyes and he bats at them with his sleeve, but they will not stop coming and coming, mingling with the tap water, stinging his eyelids, his cheeks, his mouth where they run in along the tap water-tracks to sting at his lips. He can see his distorted reflection in the silver tap, face red and blotchy and _weak._

 

He doesn’t know how long he stands there, braced against the sink, waiting and waiting until his chest stops heaving and his eyes stop leaking. His tongue feels thick and useless in his mouth, and his gullet has that uncomfortable feeling of a dry ball lodged in the junction between nose and throat.

 

 _Emotional lability,_ he tells himself, taking in a great, rattling breath. _It’s the cocaine, again. It must be._

 

It _must._

 

　

 

**MARCH, 2005**

 

　

“What the bloody fuck,” says Detective Sergeant Lestrade, glaring at the offending toaster. It has charred his bread into a black square vaguely reminiscent of Pompeii. He considers eating it anyway - he’s too close to being late for work to make any more - but his phone beeps again and he is flying pell-mell out of the front door, sans toast, shouting goodbye to his wife before he remembers she moved out two years ago. He’s halfway to the nearest Tube station before he catches sight of a vacant cab and dives in hastily, thinking about the car he’d buy if the arses at the Met would actually give him his long-overdue promotion.

 

By the time he gets to the Yard, however, he is cool and collected; to all outward observers he’s back in control as he strides past reception, making it into his cubicle at 9:01 with his tie straight and his hair combed neatly, close enough to punctual for no one to notice.

 

Of course, he’s barely picked up his pen before he’s interrupted by the most irritating Detective Inspector in the Yard.

 

“Hey,” Athelney says, leaning over the cubicle partition in the least professional manner possible, gently-glowing cigarette in one hand and Styrofoam coffee cup in the other. His dark hair is slicked back over the wide-set planes of his broad skull.

 

“Morning,” says Lestrade brusquely, suppressing the urge to remark that Athelney’s head is blocking his light. Athelney Jones is the sort of thirty year-old who still parrots all his father’s opinions on left-wing politicians in an attempt to sound well-educated and buys the Financial Times purely to be seen carrying it around. Lestrade hates him.

 

Athelney, fortunately does not seem to have noticed. “Heard about Big Jim?”

 

Lestrade stares at him blankly.

 

“Jim Callaghan,” says Athelney, impatiently, as if Lestrade is _stupid;_ as if Lestrade hasn’t spent the last year sorting out the messes Athelney makes every time they are given a new case. “Ex-Prime Minister. The one that fucked it up in, what, 1970? 1971? The Labour guy.”

 

 _1980,_ Lestrade wants to say, gripping his pen more tightly. _You were barely out of nursery, you stupid git._ He can’t stand kids like this, who think they know everything there is to know about politics because they’ve read the headlines of the Daily Mail a few times. Lestrade wouldn’t use the Mail to wrap his Friday night fish-and-chips.

 

“He’s dead,” Athelney goes on, carelessly. “Liver failure and some other stuff, I dunno. Good riddance, I say.”

 

_Liver failure._

 

Lestrade’s hand strays almost unconsciously to the old, creased photo taped to the bottom of his computer monitor. It’s a few years old, worn at the edges from constant thumbing, but he can’t bear to replace it.

 

It’s one of the only ones of the entire family, taken a year before Tom died, before the subsequent divorce. In the photo, Helen’s soft arms are wrapped tightly around his shoulders, smiling down at Lestrade as he balances a pair of three-year old boys - Daniel blonde and smiling, Tom dark-haired and thoughtful - on his knees. Little Carrie, tomboyish even then, leans against Helen’s hip, dimpled and freckly in muddy dungarees. The angle isn’t quite straight, none of them are looking at the camera, and it’s a little blurred where Daniel’s little arms windmill frantically to keep his balance, but Lestrade has never cared. His family is beautiful. Was beautiful.

 

“Oh yeah, the kids,” says Athelney, noticing his thumb sweeping over the family photograph. He’s still hanging over the partition, a few crumbs sticking to his expensive tie. “How’s it going then? With Hattie and the twins? She still letting you see them on Sundays?”

 

“ _Helen,_ ” grates out Lestrade. He can feel the cheap plastic of the biro’s barrel threatening to crack under his thumb. “Her name’s Helen. And they’re _triplets._ ”

 

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” says Athelney, not sounding sorry at all. “But they’re not, really, are they, if there are only two of them now?”

 

“I’ve got work to do,” says Lestrade, loudly, and stabs vengefully at the power button on his computer with his pen.

 

What the _fuck_ is the point of his life?

 

It’s barely a quarter of an hour before Athelney is back, harassing him about some e-mail or other, as if Lestrade can’t _see_ the bloody notification symbol on the system, as if he isn't planning to get to it after he’s finished covering all Athelney’s fuck-ups on the Cournalson case. He wouldn’t do it, if not for the rest of the team. If not for London.

 

“He keeps showing up,” whines Athelney. “We’ve got no idea who he is. He never says anything, just lurks around crime scenes. Personally I think he’s a -”

 

“I’ll look at it,” interrupts Lestrade, testily, because today is not the kind of day on which he can deal with Athelney Jones’ prejudices and bigotry, and opens the e-mail with a few angry clicks of the mouse.

 

It’s a video attachment, so he lets it buffer while Athelney harps on about the mystery man and Lestrade pretends to listen; he’s on the edge of losing his job, after all.

 

The video finally loads, and Lestrade hits play instantly, though it’s mainly to shut Athelney up.

 

The first minute or so consists of monochrome CCTV shots of the back of a lanky, dark-haired youth at various different crime scenes. In the first, he’s leaning against the window of a coffee shop as policemen swarm around the dead bodies of three blonde women, killed in a drive-by shooting outside Holborn; in the second, he’s steadying himself against a lamppost while officers tape off a section around a theatre Lestrade can’t remember the name of. 

 

It goes on, still after still of security feed showing the kid at different crime scenes, always leaning against something, always avoiding the camera, until he comes to actual footage of the kid, the picture blown up large and slightly blurry.

 

The kid - he _needs_ to stop calling everyone under thirty a kid, he realises - is sprawled on the floor, clearly having fallen over - what? His own feet? No one around him seems to care, though; bodies sweep past the youth as he struggles to his feet, massaging his knees, and Lestrade frowns, thinking of the stills of him leaning against windows and telegraph poles and letterboxes; it jogs a memory, somewhere, but he can’t place it.

 

The boy straightens up awkwardly, as though it hurts to move, and Lestrade can’t help but notice the way the shirt billows in around the kid’s concave stomach and too-straight hips. His wrists are skinnier even than the small cuffs of the long-sleeved shirt that ends just above the bump of his wrists - and that’s wrong, already, because he can see the sky and it’s bright white; on CCTV that almost certainly makes it one of those anomalous boiling days in the middle of March that send everyone into a tizzy about climate change. Not a day for long sleeves. _Junkie_ , he thinks, distractedly; there’s a more PC term for it, these days, but he doesn’t care.

 

Then the lad’s head turns, looks directly up at the camera, and Lestrade’s world goes to hell.

*

There’s not _much_ of a resemblance, he tells himself, ten minutes later, locked in a staff toilet cubicle with his forehead leaning against the smooth taupe plastic of the bolted door. He can hear someone pissing into the urinal against the other wall. Probably one of the new constables; no inspector would grunt like that, like an adolescent bull. Fucking moron.

 

There is the short _hzzthwup_ of a zip, the brief, rapid _hwssshwssh_ of a tap peppered with the squelch of the liquid soap dispenser and the brief ripping of paper towels, and then the door is creaking open and slamming dully back into its frame, thudding wood on wood, and Lestrade is alone again.

 

It’s embarrassing, really; he’s a Detective Sergeant. This is going to set his already overdue promotion back several months. _It’s been two years, Greg,_ they’ll say. _Maybe you should take a holiday._ And Athelney - God, Athelney will be _insufferable._

 

But the kid reminds him so much of Tom that it hurts to even think about it, to rationalise it.

 

He tries to tell himself that it’s only because he’d been thinking about Tom a few seconds before, because both of them were in his line of vision, Tom in the creased photograph and the kid on the screen. Really, if he wasn’t so wound up, it would never have occurred to him at all that some twenty year-old junkie might in any way resemble his dead five year-old son.

 

It’s just the hair, he tells himself; the same loose mop of dark curls desperately in need of cutting, the way Tom’s had been before the chemotherapy the doctors had promised would help. That and the slightly hunted look on his face, the permanent feeling of being an animal in flight.

 

And his _body_. Lestrade, like any red-blooded male, went through the phase of liking girls - and blokes, but that’s been a _long_ time - with lean, skinny bodies and endless legs. But the boy’s body is nothing like the long, slim lines of Heather Thomas or Christie Brinkley that he remembers jacking off to in his youth. It’s emaciated, skeletal; Lestrade could snap him like a piece of old, dead wood. He remembers how thin Tom got; how he couldn’t eat, would poke at his stomach with a confused expression, would turn his head away and ball tiny fists when Lestrade made desperate aeroplane noises, weaving the spoon through the air, not stopping until Tom forced out a laugh and Lestrade pretended to believe it was real.

 

All at once, he’s filled with a sudden rage; he’s seen kids like this one too many times before, drugged up to their eyeballs, chucking their lives away for a shot of heroin or morphine or cocaine. He’s heard their excuses; it makes them feel alive, makes them feel powerful. He wants to shake them all, sometimes; shake every last junkie in London until they see sense, until they stop turning up dead on his watch, in his paperwork, in his inbox with Athelney Jones breathing down his neck.

 

It’s fucking _hard_ to work for the police, he thinks, and then, _Jesus, just a kid._

 

Just a stupid, irresponsible, unappreciative kid, chucking away the life Lestrade would die to give to Tom.

 

_Just a kid._

 

　

　

**MAY, 2005.**

 

Nowadays, Sherlock Holmes thinks about crime scenes when men fuck him.

 

He has a vague feeling that there is something slightly amoral about this, but it helps him avoid thinking about whatever he’s unwilling to admit the cocaine is doing to his body.

 

At this moment, he is on his aching knees on the bed, gripping the flimsy headboard as the grey-haired client slams into him messily, without technique or sensuality. It’s unpolished; clumsy. The man’s sweaty balls slap dully against the flushed red skin in the cleft of his backside, latexed dick thrusting harder than is really comfortable. _But he’s paid in advance,_ thinks Sherlock, _so what does it matter?_

 

Sherlock prefers this, somehow, to the men who occasionally want what he’s mentally taken to calling ‘the boyfriend experience’; the ones who like to do what they so sentimentally refer to as ‘making love’. He tolerates them - partly because they fall asleep in his bed with their limbs all spread over him and are warmer than blankets, but mainly because they pay extra for the privilege of having him kiss them from their noses to their toes and back up again, whispering false words like ‘I love you,’ and ‘darling’ all the way.

 

They never return the favour. There is that much to be grateful for, at least.

 

When the man finally finishes rutting into him, collapsing onto the creaking bed with a piglike grunt and a limp spurt of come, Sherlock is sore and aching, but he pulls the condom off the man’s softening dick anyway, looking away as the man pulls his trousers back up over his flabby knees and tucks himself in.

 

When he’s gone, Sherlock lies alone in the dank, sweaty bedsit, deliberating the finer points of yesterday’s case, hands folded over his jutting ribs, ignoring the sensation of sweat drying on his skin and the dull ache in his backside.

 

He wants cocaine, but he’s too stiff to get up and make up the solution, now. He’ll do it in a minute, he decides, staring at the pattern of mould on the ceiling. He’s got better things to think about, even for a moment.

 

Criminals.

 

_Fascinating._


End file.
